Thing Ethnography in a Factory: Exploring Emergent and Dynamic Relations of Cobots and Workers

Collaborative robots (cobots) are often portrayed as transformative technologies that promise efficiency and productivity in industrial workplaces, with their roles frequently pre-defined as autonomous collaborators to human workers. This paper presents a different picture based on an 18-day robot-centered thing ethnography conducted in a small-scale factory. In practice, the roles of cobots were dynamically constituted through intra-actions among CNC machines, human workers, and the factory owner. Our analysis identifies three roles: (1) frontline operators carrying out repetitive tasks, (2) care receivers dependent on continuous maintenance and cleaning, and (3) scapegoating managers whose stoppages summoned human intervention and mediation. These relational configurations foreground dynamics that remain backgrounded in human-centered accounts and offer a deeper understanding of how cobots are enacted within production environments. We argue that understanding cobot integration and advancing practical design discourse requires moving beyond assumptions of collaboration and autonomy, recognizing cobots as entities continuously redefined through their relations with environments and other agents.